overview

Source of the following (written) content: 7.7 Parenting Styles by L. D. Worthy, Trisha Lavigne, & Fernando Romero is licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Original source: https://open.maricopa.edu/culturepsychology.

As children mature, parent-child relationships naturally change. Preschool and grade-school children are more capable, have their own preferences, and sometimes refuse or seek to compromise with parental expectations. This can lead to greater parent-child conflict, and how conflict is managed by parents further shapes the quality of parent-child relationships. So, what can parents do to nurture a healthy self-concept?

Diana Baumrind suggests parenting style may be a factor. The way someone parents is an important factor in a child’s socioemotional growth. Baumrind developed and refined a theory describing parenting styles based on two aspects of parenting that are found to be extremely important:

• Parental responsiveness, which refers to the degree the parent responds to the child’s needs.
• Parental demandingness, is the extent to which the parent expects more mature and responsible behavior from a child.

Using these two dimensions, she recognized three different parenting styles:

• Authoritarian
• Permissive
• Authoritative

A 4th parenting style is neglectful/uninvolved parenting, and a 5th style (overinvolved parenting) has been proposed.

Name that parenting style: